A Huge Revolution of Theatrical Commerce
A Huge Revolution of Theatrical Commerce

Author: Matteo Paoletti

Publisher: Cambridge University Press

Published: 2020-08-13

Total Pages: 101

ISBN-13: 1108847331

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In the first third of the twentieth century, South America became the most important market for many European theatrical companies. When Italy found itself in various theatrical crises, Walter Mocchi created a transoceanic theatrical empire, using his business acumen to craft viable solutions. While his efforts were most visible in the sphere of opera, he played an extremely significant role in the promotion and circulation of popular forms of musical theatre (such as operetta) and staged world premieres of works by Italian superstars in Argentina (such as Mascagni's Isabeau), thus offering an early example of what Stephen Greenblatt calls 'cultural mobility'.

The Year that Made the Musical
The Year that Made the Musical

Author: William A. Everett

Publisher: Cambridge University Press

Published: 2024-07-11

Total Pages: 499

ISBN-13: 1009316508

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Whether they appeared on Broadway or the Strand, the shows appearing in 1924 epitomized the glamor of popular musical theatre. What made this particular year so distinctive – so special – was the way it brought together the old and the new, the venerated and the innovative, and the traditional and the chic. William Everett, in his compelling new book, reveals this remarkable mid-Roaring Twenties stagecraft to have been truly transnational, with a stellar cast of producers, performers and creators boldly experimenting worldwide. Revues, musical comedies, zarzuelas and operettas formed part of a thriving theatrical ecosystem, with many works – and their leading artists – now unpredictably defying genres. The author demonstrates how fresh approaches became highly successful, with established leads like Marie Tempest and Fred Stone appearing in new productions even as youthful talents such as Florence Mills, Fred and Adele Astaire, Gertrude Lawrence and George Gershwin now started to make their mark.

Urban Popular Culture and Entertainment
Urban Popular Culture and Entertainment

Author: Antje Dietze

Publisher: Taylor & Francis

Published: 2022-12-09

Total Pages: 251

ISBN-13: 1000803333

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This book is part of an ongoing transnational turn in cultural history. Studies on the history of urban popular culture and the entertainment industries increasingly engage with the European or global circulation of genres, actors, and shows, especially during the period of massive growth and expansion of the sector from the 1870s to the 1930s. Nevertheless, a large part of this research remains focused on exchanges between Western and Central European, and North American metropolises. To provide a fuller picture of the emergence and cross-border transfer of different genres of popular culture, this volume investigates Northern, East Central, and Southern European cities and their relations with each other and the West. The authors analyze the mediating agents, transnational networks, and local responses to new forms of entertainment from Madrid to Vyborg, and from Istanbul to Reykjavík. These examples re-focus the history of urban popular culture in Europe in view of multidirectional transfers and a wider range of regional experiences. Urban Popular Culture and Entertainment will appeal to researchers and students alike interested in the history of popular culture in modern societies, particularly those studying urban centers in Europe, and their transnational and transregional connections.

Musicking in Twentieth-Century Europe
Musicking in Twentieth-Century Europe

Author: Klaus Nathaus

Publisher: Walter de Gruyter GmbH & Co KG

Published: 2020-12-16

Total Pages: 455

ISBN-13: 3110648210

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Music has gained the increasing attention of historians. Research has branched out to explore music-related topics, including creative labor, economic histories of music production, the social and political uses of music, and musical globalization. This handbook both covers the history of music in Europe and probes its role for the making of Europe during a "long" twentieth century. It offers concise guidance to key historical trends as well as the most important research on central topics within the field.

The Empire at the Opéra
The Empire at the Opéra

Author: Mark Everist

Publisher: Cambridge University Press

Published: 2021-01-21

Total Pages: 61

ISBN-13: 1108904726

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Although nineteenth-century legislation had tried to ensure a precise separation between genre and institution for Parisian music in the theatre, it had inadvertently laid out a field on which the politics of genre could be played out as agents and actors of all types deployed various forms of artistic power. During the Second Empire, from 1854 until 1870, the state took over day-to-day control of the Opéra in ways that were without precedent. Every element of the Opéra's activity was subjugated to the exigency of Empire; the selection or artists, works and more general questions of artistic policy were handed over to politicians. The Opéra effectively became a branch of government. The result was a stagnation of the Opéra's repertory, and beneficiaries were the composers of larger-scale works for competing organisations: the Opéra Comique and the Théâtre Lyrique.

“Why Aren't They Talking?”
“Why Aren't They Talking?”

Author: Alex Bádue

Publisher: Cambridge University Press

Published: 2022-03-10

Total Pages: 133

ISBN-13: 1108856721

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In the American musical theater, the most typical form of structuring musicals has been the book musical, in which songs interrupt spoken dialogue and add means to depict characters and dramatic situations. After 1980, a form of structuring musicals that expands upon the aesthetic conventions of the book musical came to prominence. Sung-through musicals challenged the balance between talking and singing in musical theater in scripts that are entirely or nearly entirely sung. Although often associated with British musicals, this Element focuses on American sung-through musicals composed and premiered between 1980 and 2019. Their creative teams have employed specific procedures and compositional techniques through which music establishes characterization and expression when either very little or nothing is spoken and thus define how the musical reinvented itself toward and in the twenty-first century.

Kickstarting Italian Opera in the Andes
Kickstarting Italian Opera in the Andes

Author: José Manuel Izquierdo König

Publisher: Cambridge University Press

Published: 2023-01-31

Total Pages: 137

ISBN-13: 1009223011

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During the 19th century, Italian opera became truly transatlantic and its rapid expansion is one of the most exciting new areas of study in music and the performing arts. Beyond the Atlantic coasts, opera searched for new spaces to expand its reach. This Element discusses about the Italian opera in Andean countries like Chile, Peru, Ecuador and Bolivia during the 1840s and focuses on opera as a product that both challenged and was challenged in the Andes by other forms of performing arts, behaviours, technologies, material realities, and business models.

Offenbach Performance in Budapest, 1920–1956
Offenbach Performance in Budapest, 1920–1956

Author: Péter Bozó

Publisher: Cambridge University Press

Published: 2022-06-23

Total Pages: 158

ISBN-13: 1108968414

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As a legacy of the Habsburg Empire, performances of Jacques Offenbach's musical stage works played an important role in Budapest musico-theatrical life in the twentieth century. However, between the collapse of the Empire and the 1956 anti-Soviet revolution, political ideologies strongly influenced the character of these productions, when they took place. Public performances of Offenbach's works were prohibited between 1938 and 1945 and they became the bases for propagandadistic adaptations in the 1950s. This element explores how the local operetta tradition and the vogue of operettas featuring composers as characters during the interwar period were also important factors in how Offenbach's stage works were performed in mid-twentieth century Budapest in versions that sometimes bore little resemblance to the originals.

Networking Operatic Italy
Networking Operatic Italy

Author: Francesca Vella

Publisher: University of Chicago Press

Published: 2022-01-26

Total Pages: 262

ISBN-13: 0226815714

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A study of the networks of opera production and critical discourse that shaped Italian cultural identity during and after Unification. Opera’s role in shaping Italian identity has long fascinated both critics and scholars. Whereas the romance of the Risorgimento once spurred analyses of how individual works and styles grew out of and fostered specifically “Italian” sensibilities and modes of address, more recently scholars have discovered the ways in which opera has animated Italians’ social and cultural life in myriad different local contexts. In Networking Operatic Italy, Francesca Vella reexamines this much-debated topic by exploring how, where, and why opera traveled on the mid-nineteenth-century peninsula, and what this mobility meant for opera, Italian cities, and Italy alike. Focusing on the 1850s to the 1870s, Vella attends to opera’s encounters with new technologies of transportation and communication, as well as its continued dissemination through newspapers, wind bands, and singing human bodies. Ultimately, this book sheds light on the vibrancy and complexity of nineteenth-century Italian operatic cultures, challenging many of our assumptions about an often exoticized country.

Genre Beyond Borders
Genre Beyond Borders

Author: Bruno Bower

Publisher: Taylor & Francis

Published: 2023-12-18

Total Pages: 264

ISBN-13: 1003826032

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This book offers an innovative approach to understanding operetta, drawing attention to its malleability and resistance to boundaries. These shows have traversed (and continue to traverse) with ease the national borders which might superficially define them, or draw on features from many other genres without fundamentally changing in tone or approach. The chapters move from nineteenth-century London and Paris to twentieth-century North America, South America and Europe to present-day Australia. Some offer fresh understandings of familiar composers, such as Johann Strauss or Gilbert and Sullivan, while others examine works or composers that are less well-known. The chapter on Socialist operetta in Czechoslovakia in particular will almost certainly be a revelation to anyone from Western Europe or the US, where operetta is often understood to be a bourgeois phenomenon. As a summary of the current state of the field, this collection showcases the many possible pathways for future scholars who wish to explore it.